Hot Air » Blog Archive » Obama on Smart Grid: No longer about jobs

...their retreat from “jobs, jobs, jobs,” shows that the White House understands that they own rising unemployment, and that their program isn’t helping to stem it at all.

The ChamberPost: Will Enviros Permit Recovery?

The USA Today reports: "Under pressure to spend stimulus money quickly, many states are using the federal funds for short-term projects and to fill budget gaps rather than spending on long-term improvements, according to a report by congressional investigators."

The report would be by the GAO on the Recovery Act addressing "States' and Localities' Current and Planned Uses of Funds While Facing Fiscal Stresses." One interesting omission in the report is a comprehensive assessment of getting environmental permits as a limiting factor to stimulus. In fact the only mention of environmental clearances is the Highway Infrastructure Investment section, which says "Across the nation, almost half of the obligations have been for pavement improvement projects because they did not require extensive environmental clearances..."

Get Ready for the Carbon Offset Accounting Follies | Coyote Blog

I have already written before about carbon offset companies apparently double or even triple counting carbon credits or offsets. Here is another example, sent by a reader:

G-8 Nations Fail to Agree on Plan to Fight Climate Change - NYTimes.com

The failure to establish specific targets on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging longstanding divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the specific emissions limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020, and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help.

“They’re saying, ‘We just don’t trust you guys,’ ” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. “It’s the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president.”